FIDE Chess Olympiad - The first five rounds

Azerbaijan at the top is not a surprise. The guys - Mamedyarov, Radjabov, Naiditsch, Mamedov and Safarli make a decent team. The real surprise is that Russia lost a match (vs. Poland, which is among the top tiers). We're talking about a super-team here: Karjakin, Nepomniachtchi, Kramnik, Vitiugov, and Jakovenko. The Russians managed to recover in round 5 though, beating Perù. Kramnik and Karjakin won their games, to bring home the full point. This is a long tournament, but with all these strong squads on top, it looks like a difficult task for the Russians to come back and fight for a medal. We'll see.

The reigning champions USA at the moment sit on the 5th spot of the ranking. In round two, the local heroes Georgia 3 (no GMs, three 2300 and a 2400+), almost achieved an amazing upset by scaring the strongest team of the event. Caruana, Shankland and Robson could not go beyond a draw against their much lower rated (and titled) Georgian opponents. Luckily for the US, a much in-form Wesley So disposed of his foe with relative ease.

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Round 5 proved to be a difficult one for the US boys. Israel is a strong team, with Gelfand, Rodshtein, Nabaty, Sutovsky, and Smirin. Even though rating-wise the USA are much stronger, the Israeli are very experienced players, and today it showed. Caruana won relatively easily with Gelfand, and the match seemed to go in the right direction of the Americans.

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But then two draws (Nakamura and So, respectively with Nabaty and Rodshtein) and Sam Shankland debacle against Sutovsky, led the match to a draw.

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